A new tool called Allinea Performance Reports is allowing Cardiff University researchers to see clearly what is happening within their HPC system – and ensure optimum performance from their applications.

Cardiff University has been using Allinea Performance Reports to gain more insight into their systems at both its ARCCA service – which provides access and training in advanced computing to students and researchers – and at HPC Wales, its world-class supercomputing service for researchers and innovators in the public and private sectors.

Allinea Performance Reports has given us an insight into where workloads can be adjusted, which can be placed on more effectively on the hardware, or even recompiled to be able to perform more simulations to satisfy the demand for time on our systems,” says Martyn Guest, Director of ARCCA and Technical Director of HPC Wales.

Allinea Performance Reports analyzes key metrics such as the effective vectorization, I/O and MPI performance for any application, allowing users and system managers to make sure code runs as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Our customers told us they need to see what is really happening in the HPC applications running on their systems and their real impact on the results,” says David Lecomber, CEO of Allinea Software. “They wanted a tool that would be so easy and non-intrusive to apply that it could analyze applications without configuration or change and help them to recognize where to focus their efforts to make the biggest differences – from using ISV software to running locally developed applications. Allinea Performance Reports allows users to improve the quality of every CPU hour used, “ continues Lecomber, “and each application to make the most use of the right system, the right configuration and the right usage.”

In this video from SC13, Mark O’Connor from Allinea Software describes how the company’s new Performance Report Tools provide a scalable and effective way to characterize and understand the performance of HPC application runs, without needing to instrument or recompile.

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